Choo-Choo-Choose Them - Episode #125 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:11 Jason Atwood: This is the 125th episode of CloudFocus Weekly on a It's Valentine's Day! This episode is titled Choo Choo Choo's Me. Caught by the Week of Spice, sponsored by Arkus. Caught by the experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me is my special Valentine, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you doing today?

Justin Edelstein: I'm alright. I'm a little taken aback by me being your Valentine. Oh. You're wearing your red shirt. I am wearing my red... Red... Red shirt. Valentine's shirt. Yes.

Jason Atwood: It's very flashy. Isn't the always trying to court he always is but so he he It's a Valentine's Day episode where he doesn't have a Valentine's Day She feels sorry for him And so he like she writes a card that it's like one of those stupid Valentine's cards that says I Chew chew choose you and has a as a a train ticket train Oh, it's like a it's one of these things. It's like If you're a fan, that's a huge one. Anyway, it's Valentine's Day.

Justin Edelstein: So choose me. You just chose me. Did you choose me? I didn't choose you.

Jason Atwood: Well, I did choose the agenda. You did choose me. We have a blog post by you about how Salesforce developers can make a Salesforce admin's life easier. Mwah! And we have how... That's just piggy with time. out. Mark Benioff is choo choo choosings some Yammer employees and then we have how do you here's my question what does Salesforce Star Trek and Steve Jobs have in common we'll talk about it and then we'll make our cloud pick, cloud focus app pick of the week and then we'll be out so we can all go celebrate this day of Valorant.com So first up the blog post. Yes your blog post. I wrote it. You were next up on the on the blog post Thing calendar calendar we call it. Yes, I'm called somewhere else. Yes So explain your blog post and why you wrote it wonder where your mind went

Justin Edelstein: Figured that's where it went actually So I wrote a post about how a custom Apex visual force developer, not like a in the Salesforce spectrum, not a clicks developer who's developing custom objects and workflows and validation. Not 401. 501. Not 401. The 501 level of certification where you know you're writing Apex classes and triggers. and you're writing Visualforce pages, how those people out there could make the clicks admins life a lot easier and make them kind of empower them to do things that they wouldn't generally or normally be able to do by using some techniques when writing their code. So basically it's best practices in Apex develop...

03:38 Jason Atwood: Apex or... Salesforce development to make your application easy for admins to augment,

Justin Edelstein: Change, manipulate, what have you. So I just wrote my three favorite ones. I'm sure there's so many more that are out there that can be utilized by, by, by. developers to plug into their code I'll just give my favorite one sure field sets I knew field sets are oddly rd oddly enough still labeled as a beta feature it's been. a while. spring 11. wow I had to look that up because I was like this has been around at least a year when was this spring 11 is still beta So field sets are the ability for a, well an admin can create them. Basically on a given object or related objects, so if there's a parent child relationship, you can actually pull fields from the child records as well. Group. Bunch of fields into one set so when you're a developer and you're writing a visual force page you can reference the Name of the field set and it will just display all the fields that are in that set as opposed to You know hard coding in this field this field this field this field this field this field this field You know 20 fields you can just say field set And then an administrator can drag and drop fields into and out of the set and make them required inside of the set.

Justin Edelstein: So it can really, with very easy, almost like a page layout, drag and drop fields around on a Visualforce page, change the Let me know in the comments section. Thank you. See you next time. Pull them right off the page all sorts of fun stuff Without a developer having to touch the visual force page very small at all very smart nice feature from sales And if you're doing a lot of like visual visual force pages It's a reference where you're kind of like glared testing or beta testing or you want the same form to render The... until the end of days or until it comes out of data or until they pull this feature out of the, but I can't imagine them pulling the feature, it's really good. And it's very useful.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I'm gonna leave one untalked about because then someone has to go read the article or the blog at blog.arkusinc.com. Yeah, what is front of you gonna pick? I'm gonna pick the one that I've used in applications and we've written an application for two clients. two individual clients. And same basic concept of an application, but wrote it, sort of, we did it once. And then when we did it again, we learned from what they wanted, sort of, in the first one. And so we built in the custom settings. So custom settings, the ability to, there's a thing in Salesforce, and I don't think it's in beta, but you can build a. And they're not as sort of, they're not really well, as a user when you go as an admin, as a simple old, I'm just an admin, like when I go, I'm like, oh wait, am I supposed to manage or touch or whatever?

07:19 Jason Atwood: Anyway, there are these things. As an admin, you're supposed to manage them, right? But you can edit them, it's a little strange. Anyway, but basically you can build in settings that the visual force or Apex or whatever is looking to, so you can control some features and functions, so without having to. We're now having to go into the code and change batch by this or batch by that or use you use example of how many batch size, how many things you want to show on a page.

Justin Edelstein: You build that into a custom setting. I use pagination as an example.

Jason Atwood: But we've done it for huge programs that go over and batch over millions of records or hundreds of thousands of records. and you know, how do you want to chunk them up? What do you want to include? We have this all in custom settings. That means someone can go in and just, you know, change the bit on it and whenever he runs, it runs and does a new set of things. So, those two are really, really powerful, putting things in custom settings. Again, it takes more effort because you have to then, instead of just writing, you know, the letter. or the number two, you have to then reference this thing and go build it and then have it referenced.

Justin Edelstein: The compliance The the, the compliance locker uses custom setting. Oh nice, AppExchange plug. AppExchange plug. So the setting screen on the compliance locker, you're, we just put an interface on top of a custom setting. Right. You're filling in all the fields in the settings record. Right. All the setting screen is, is a pretty, pretty version of. the values that you're plugging into the setting record. And it's the right way to build apps.

Jason Atwood: It means the way you should be doing it. I've seen apps that actually was talking to a developer, a non-developer, a maker of an application, a big time application that's based on the force.com platform. And they had started a couple of years ago and they were saying, oh, we now have to migrate a lot of our stuff to using custom settings because we didn't do custom settings. They actually used objects.

Justin Edelstein: So they did the old fashion way. People used to use reference and look up. Now you can use settings to do the same thing. So cool stuff. So go to blog.arcasynch.com. There's another one out there. So go find the other one.

Jason Atwood: Oh yes, there's one more. There's a third one. And remember you can comment on the below using discuss or... That's what you want to do. So do that. Next up, we have an interesting story. This has actually been all over the Twitterverse. It's made news, it got to all things D, so that's kind of, you know, that's a Wall Street Journal spinoff website. The headline is Salesforce CEO, Benioff, invites laid-off Yammer employees to work for him. So the story is that Microsoft bought Yammer, right? what I was it, 1.2 billion dollars. But now is doing what most companies when they do, they buy companies do is, well, we have two of the same people. You and you, you're the same. We need to get rid of one. And this is how they save money and how they basically cover the cost of buying.

Jason Atwood: So they're laying off some of the people who are original Yammer employees. So, many up in his funny way. tweets it tweets it out saying attention this week laid off yammer employees Salesforce is hiring Please send me your CV interesting. So he's a CV is very British To CEO at Salesforce comm which is kind of funny. I Don't know what CV is. Oh It's a it's the European. It's a resume resume, but not resume. It's a resume, but it's called a Come on, what is it Google?

10:44 Justin Edelstein: I'm gonna do it. Google, come on Google. Do it, do it. Come on Google. Google.

Jason Atwood: Dead air. Yeah, no dead air on the air. No, I'm Googling. I'm on CV. What is it? No. Cover something? Curriculum vertae. Ah,. Please.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, no, Curriculum vitae. Vitae. This is because he was tweeting and he needed. to get it under one path of life so it stands it's a lot in the stands for path of

Jason Atwood: Life is what they call yeah that's a bending off thing that's why I didn't know it's freaking Latin yeah all right come on mark come on say resume

Justin Edelstein: Come on let's just say resume just do it why not say resume I don't know he was limited 240 characters and that's true why that's right and he put in a link so kind of interesting I mean yeah why wouldn't he number one it's a very fun little publicity stunt that he's often doing. One tweet gets you coverage in a wall street journal. He does this all the time. So not only,

Jason Atwood: Here's what you get out there when you do this. You get out, you get out, ooh look, Yammer, I'm now publicizing that Microsoft is firing people.

Justin Edelstein: Right, Microsoft firing bad. Microsoft bad. acquisition of wire and then fire bad

Jason Atwood: I'm saying we're still here and we're doing great and doing well All the time.

Justin Edelstein: I was at a client last week and they were yammering it. They were yammering and it was like Why are you not using chatter? Well, everyone doesn't have Salesforce So well by the end of this project everyone's gonna have Salesforce. Well people like yammer. I'm like, yeah, but you know, we're rationalizing Yeah, just

Jason Atwood: Getting a more she did a blog post Two years ago called the Yammer versus Chatter and you had to revisit last

Justin Edelstein: Year I think you should revisit it again It's taking it takes a toll because I don't know Yammer anymore at all haven't used it in a long long time Maybe this client will let me just do a yammer showdown. Yeah Well, like let me just just give me an account. Let me play around with it, right?

Jason Atwood: So anyway, interesting You know Chatter is certainly, as we've seen with Chatter Tasks, which came out in spring 13, I think we talked about that last week, podcast. And I've made this prediction before, and as you've learned, as you've gone to say, I've learned to be right, so my predictions sometimes come true. I have a feeling, with seeing things like Chatter Tasks, seeing things like Chatter Approvals, that the rest of where the UI for Salesforce has always been going is into Chatter. You're going to do more and more in Chatter. It's like case feed. Thanks, everyone, for joining us in today's session. We'll see you next week on the class. Yeah, and, and it's gonna be, it's gonna be interesting. Now I'm not saying that's the right thing. It might be right. As someone who uses chatter a lot and in different orgs, there are some things about it that I really love, and there are some things about it that I, like using the chatter desktop for this one org that I'm trying to stay on top of, I find it just confusing and hard to use.

13:44 Jason Atwood: And I'm like, what am I doing in here? Anyway.. So, Benioff invites people. I think he, it's a great picture of him. It's like this. He's, I guess, it's like some conference, but he's like smiling. He's like got the big, big old, big head smile on. And speaking of that, so here's my question to you. Do you, What does Salesforce, Apple, and Star Trek have in common?

Justin Edelstein: I have no idea. So I have no idea where Star Trek comes into play in this. Okay, so I get the Salesforce Apple connection I have no idea

Jason Atwood: This is very so this is an article. This is on upstart business journal. It's also been all over the place So it's really based on Beni off before Steve job died Beni off gave him is a trademark to App Store. Because Benioff controlled it. So, Salesforce had Exchange.

Justin Edelstein: With the AppExchange. Right, they even used to say that. I don't know if they did it like in their official marketing but the sales people... No, they call it the App Store of applications. No, they would call it the iTunes of applications. The iTunes? Really? Really.

Jason Atwood: So, Mark Band of Handed Steve Jobs before he died, the App Store name and trademark, which is interesting. So I guess it was used for doing, for talking about the app store. Now, it's the first time it's being used because there's a domain and they're using it for pointing to a app store app, the new Star Trek movie. So, so appstore.com slash Star Trek app. Right. It points to the sales, to the app store. So they'll open the app store. So instead of going to like movie.com slash star check which gets you the movie site page, this goes to the app because a lot of these movies now, movies and TV shows, I mean Walking Dead which just started up last week. Yeah, AMC story sync. Well stories, they have full on games, they have a lot of apps they put around and this is a big thing.

Jason Atwood: Like now, instead of, it used to be you'd do a happy meal.

Justin Edelstein: ,, They do And the reason this became, oh, what do you mean Google Plus can't do this? Like I still can't have a vanity Google Plus Earl. Yeah, I saw that. But all of the sudden out of nowhere here's this App Store. Well it's an App Store. Appstore.com slash vanity. Vanity Earl,

17:00 Jason Atwood: Vanity in the, because when you go to, when you try to find an app in the iTunes App Store.

Justin Edelstein: It's at iTunes.apple.com slash WebObjects. We put the links in the show notes. Well, that's for the podcast.

Jason Atwood: So maybe we could get AppStore.com slash CloudFol I don We don't have an app. Right. So I don't know if it works for everything in iTunes or not.

Justin Edelstein: Anyway, kind of cool. Well, this isn't even in iTunes. It's in App Store. Well, but remember, it's all the same place. I don't think they are anymore. Yeah, well, I don't go to the app this I don't go to I don't go to I know it pops open the app store No, it tries to pop open the tries pop open my iTunes when I do this really it doesn't I was I

Jason Atwood: Was I was gonna say the one, the reason this has come up and why this is big news is because this was at the Super Bowl. There's a Super Bowl ad for Star Trek and at the end of it it was appstore.com slash Star Trek.

Justin Edelstein: Didn't even catch it, sorry.

Jason Atwood: So, well then you're not watching your ads. Missed it. Missed it. speaking of other things you've missed. Yeah, what else have I missed? Let's get your CloudFocus app, pick of the week. Alright.- I'm gonna say this is the second best podcast in the row cuz last week you were like on this tour and this week You're kind I the

Justin Edelstein: You K came you some amazing news right before we went on the air so thanks for that was it about you being my Valentine It was it was worse than that imagine that worse than that Nah, just go to Netflix go into the iTunes Go to HBO go what have you So the other day the little lady and I were sitting there knowing

20:23 Jason Atwood: They put off a rent until it's out the there. in the cycle.

Justin Edelstein: So it looked for it everywhere. I am picking. the Blockbuster box.

Jason Atwood: Not red box, the other one. The Blockbuster one. The Blockbuster one, right? That's what I'm thinking. Company that's going out of business.

Justin Edelstein: They should save their ass with this thing. Explicit podcast.- That word's not so bad.

Jason Atwood: What he meant was assets. Assets.

Justin Edelstein: Save their assets with this thing. Now you're doing purple, it's awesome. Such a bad day, I'm having such a nightmare day, and Valentine's Day is still... the night is still to come.

Jason Atwood: The little lady's gonna appreciate that you literally just compared your nightmare day with then having to spend time with your little lady in the night. So the nightmare woman because you're gonna go spend time with her. Okay, that's awesome. So bad. Now I'm sweating.

Justin Edelstein: So yeah, for a dollar, and I felt like the old man, like I was standing there, I'm like... Cuz she's like checking out buying whatever she's buying and I'm at the thing. I'm like, Oh, how's this thing work like I'm like saying it out loud like the old guy like 80 year old guy Oh you I'm like yelling. I'm like. Oh you just search for it. Oh like searching on the touchscreen Oh, they have it. Do we have a blu-ray player like I don't even know yeah, do we have blu-ray or or what? She's like no, we don't have a blu-ray. We have DVDs like oh DVD Like, it's only a dollar! She's like, alright old man, just press the button and buy it. So for a dollar, I rented the movie.

Justin Edelstein: That's my pick, seriously, I'm dead serious. I still think that's awesome. I've never done it. I could not get it anywhere except across the street for a dollar. But it was DVD, which is like... Who cares? It was perfectly fine. Oh no, quality is boosh. Quality was just fine. No. It was fine. No. It was fine. It was fine. That's my pick. Blockbuster box thing. So I will tell you,

Jason Atwood: I'm not making this my pick, but similar story. For the last three nights, the wife and I, I don't call her a little lady, the wife because she's the same size as I am. the wife and I have been watching Downton Abbey, the new season. And we, based on the different types of shows, we decide whether we're gonna watch, whether we're going to Tivo it, right? And then watch it in a series, like we're doing Deadwood, not Deadwood, Walking Dead, we're Tivoing it, right? We're gonna Tivo it and then we'll watch seven shows, we'll leave it on Tivo until it's done, then we'll watch it all together. But some shows are so good and or I might wanna come back, I want to go to the iTunes and just purchase it. So for the last three nights...

Jason Atwood: Like Gold Rush. That's not that good, but it was good. That one I like it because you get for the money, and I guess it was $19 for nine episodes. We did the math. It was like 11 hours worth of content for 20 bucks. So I was like, that's not bad. And I get to watch it now. And if I ever want to go back and rewatch it, I can. You get some extra special. So here's the making of. fine. You get the device independence. I can go watch on my Apple TV, I can watch on my iPad, I can watch it on my. So for the last three nights we've been watching that and as you're saying that was like we haven't watched real TV like for the last three nights we both want we watch who plus and we watch and we watch Apple TV streaming it's like my dependence especially now that the sport that I follow is over.

24:24 Justin Edelstein: On real You know sit there and you click a couple Yes, it hasn't been able to do that. Yes, so you made HBO go pick a while ago So now the new version can now airplay to an Apple TV now. I have a Roku box just for HBO go. Yes Now the Roku box might just sit there and although I'll still use it because it's connected right to the TV already I won't have to airplay but they promised he promised He promised when they released this they promised that he would go on the Apple TV that they would put an app on me It just should be there. I just no reason why you should have an app that streams content that you can then airplay to an Apple TV.

Jason Atwood: Why, why not just have the repack. But because I think maybe I picked this at some point repick kind of but not really But it's I but it is and it has a sales force, but is it but it's not maybe So this came out I think we just talked about it in a in an episode. I never picked it But I've been really enjoying it so Something that Apple released, I don't know, a year or two ago was iTunes U. And what is iTunes U? Well iTunes U is the ability to build all these courses and materials that are built in iTunes. So you can download materials, videos, Sound interviews from all these great universities and basically take these courses So I'm a big podcast listener as you know, and I look for certain types of people.

Jason Atwood: So there's certain things I like to us. I've been big into Seth Godin God and don't

Justin Edelstein: Know how to pronounce his name go so big He doesn't say his own name. I don't know at any point during this whole podcast.

Jason Atwood: Maybe I don't pay attention so What's nice is, so I listened to one of his books the other day, but I was like, I want more content. I want to get more content. I didn't want to go buy two more of his audio books. So I went on to iTunes U and I searched for Seth, Seth Godin. And it came back and it found all these series. And it found where he had interviews and they were basically in the iTunes and they're free. So I'm like, great, I get to have more things to listen to. So there's a couple interviews with him. And then one was this part called the Drucker Series, and it's interviews with all of these people, like it's interviews with all these sort of up and coming people, one of them and the other one that's, I was looking down the list, and they're video interviews, but now we're each, Gary Vaynerchuk was one of them.

Jason Atwood: So it caught my attention. So I'm like, I watched the Seth Godin one, which is great, it's a great interview. There's another one with Seth Godin. And then I'm like, ooh, but let's look for other people. So I started for Marc Benioff. and I found his commencement speech from like five years ago when he for For Haas University or something in California. He did it like a 20-minute commencement speech, which was actually really interesting I mean, it's a story that you know, but it was the video of it And so I was watching at the gym the other day. So It is where do I get these things? So it's all in iTunes you oh, it's in the iTunes So if you go into iTunes you it has its own catalog has own library and actually if you search iTunes iTunes you material shows up So it shows it and that's how I kind of maybe I got into it as I search for Seth Godin and then iTunes you stuff Comes up and I clicked on it and then brought me notice, but you can doubt but their movie I mean not movies but videos.

28:08 Jason Atwood: Of course materials And so I was interested in something else the other day. I was interested in business accounting. So I found a course on business accounting and I was starting to watch this course with a guy basically at the course. You're just sitting there watching the video and shows the slides and whatever. Fascinating. And again, so I'm kind of picking iTunes too but I'm also picking this thing called the Drucker series. I'm gonna link to the Drucker series because it has all these great interviews. I mean, Chopra, I don't know his name. What's his name? Deepak? Deepak, he's one of the people that interviewed. Deepak Chopra? Chopra. And just cool, interesting people. It's like what free, awesome content. And so anyway, go check it out. I will link to the actual series in there.

Jason Atwood: All right. Well, that wraps up our show. We made it in through. I'm giving you the wrap up. Yeah, you were. Very good. Remember to go to blog.arcasinc.com to find all the podcasts, all of the blog posts that we do. Remember to go to facebook.com slash Arca Sync. We're almost up to 200 likes on the big Facebook. That's not bad. Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: I put- Come on people. We know more than 200 people listen to this show.

Jason Atwood: So go out there and like it. Because we listen to it. I don't even know if I listen to it. I listen to it. I say it.

Justin Edelstein: Do you listen to it? I listen to it once every three or four episodes. Just does he I need to hear how it sounds. Okay, just to make sure it sounds right. That's good I did listen to last week's and I did notice I was in a bad mood. Yeah something you were tired Where was I what happened? You've been in a coin all day or something. Oh, I must have been like an all-day thing Yes, that's what I just said.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, you're dead We need to do like sounded like literally I know like a comment to that during the show. I did you're like you sound asleep It's okay, we're just phasing you anyway i'm gonna replace you with this bottle of water

Justin Edelstein: What do you think about that bottle of water a lot of water is dangerous It might get wet like all over the electrical. Is it just weird that nessly makes water? No, it's probably I mean it's the same exact bottle as all the other ones like Poland spring or whatever They just all from the same place. They just put a different name on it. So follow just where's your Twitter account? What's your where you at? Just that'll steam.

Jason Atwood: I met Jason at wood where Arca sink Falls almost places. Also remember we still have a in the dream for There's open there. We're also on Google Plus if you can find us. We're literally everywhere. We're literally everywhere. And LinkedIn, which is becoming better and better at like having companies you can follow. You can follow the company of Arkus, but we do the same sort of thing. We post those things. So we're on LinkedIn as well. All right. Until next week, we'll be back with another episode and more news. I have a couple cool concepts for some upcoming podcasts that we could do. So I'll say those offline and we'll incorporate them into our thing. But until then, as always, enjoy those cloudy days. Thanks for watching guys!